Today was the first day of Cheryl's running group and BR and I ran 14 miles together. It was great to catch up with her a bit and the weather was simply perfect for the run.

14 Mile Run @ 02:04:00

Last night's book reading was very intense and I am still trying to make sense of it all. The author is a bi-racial woman whose mother married a white American soldier and moved here with him. It cost her her life even beyond her 14 year death. I learned a new word. Yanggongju. It literally means "Western princess" and broadly refers to Korean women who have sexual relations with Americans. Also known as Yankee whore. These women, whose chance for a life better than the one in the war ravaged country would work at base camps for the Americans. Some were sex workers and others were not but it was a way for a future for them. Upward mobility was to marry a soldier and be taken the myth of a paradise in the United States. The price for that was to be shunned forever and severed from her family, culture and country.

This new information has cracked my birth mythology. I have always been told that my birth mother and father loved me very much and he was going to send for us when he reached the US. After she had not heard from him, she finally had to give me up because I would not have had a good life as a bi-racial child in Korea. But now I wonder, but may never know. I suspect that it would be very difficult to place a child of a sex worker with a nice Christian family in the US so maybe that information was scrubbed out. I also wonder how knowing something like that would have affected me growing up. Would I still be as well educated? As driven as I am today? Again, maybe not but I do know for sure that my birth mother suffered having her desires for a good life soldered with the shame of being a Yanggongju.

And that alone brings me some understanding of one of the threads of this invisible hooded cloak that weighs me down more some days than others.

Someone who had loved me once, and loved someone else recently said "It was really nice to be with someone who laughs all the time." I wondered what it would be like to be a person who does laugh all the time? How does one cross over to that place of light?